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ARTICLE | Clinical News

Breast Cancer Index diagnostic data

September 16, 2013 7:00 AM UTC

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and colleagues reported data from 665 postmenopausal women with estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer in a prospective comparative study showing that only the BCI predicts risk for both early (0-5 years) and late (5-10 years) recurrence. The study compared the predictive ability of BCI to the OncoType DX breast cancer assay and an IHC4 IHC test. All 3 tests were significantly predictive of early distant recurrence (p<0.0001 for all), but only BCI was significantly predictive of late distant recurrence (p=0.0048 compared to p=0.47 for OncoType DX and p=0.2 for IHC4). Furthermore, stratification using BCI was significantly associated with the risk of overall (1-10 years) distant recurrence (p<0.0001). Specifically, overall distant recurrence occurred in 6.8% of patients categorized as low risk by BCI, 17.3% of intermediate-risk patients and 22.2% of high-risk patients. The study used archived tumor samples from patients who were enrolled in the Phase III ATAC trial of Arimidex anastrozole from AstraZeneca plc (LSE:AZN; NYSE:AZN, London, U.K.) and for whom OncoType DX scores and IHC4 values had already been derived. Data were published in The Lancet Oncology. ...